“There are the brightening and flickering variable stars whose cause is all unknown and the meteor showers for all of these the reasons are as clear as for the successions of day and night. They lie just beyond the daily mist of our minds, but our eyes have not yet pierced through it.”
“We must face the light and not bury our heads in the Earth. I am hopeful that scientific investigation pushed on and on, will reveal new ways in which God works and bring to us deeper revelations of the wholly unknown. The physical and the spiritual seem to be at present separated by an impossible gulf, but at any second, that gulf may be overleapt, possibly a new revelation may come.”
Maria Mitchell (1818-1889) was a Quaker and America’s first woman astronomer. During her time, whaling was an important industry for the island: Nantucket was the world whaling capital from 1800 to 1840. Mitchell was a smart, accomplished woman who began studying astronomy at the age of twelve. She was observing one night in 1847, when she discovered a comet—for which the King of Denmark awarded her with a Gold Medal. Later, she became the first professor of astronomy at Vassar College in 1865 and the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Women in 1875. Through her work, Mitchell hoped to encourage young women to engage in astronomy.
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